*Just to add; I raised these points with PETA and they replied to my queries by blocking my twitter. Well, their PETA2 account, anyway. How mature.
Before I go off on one, I just want to point out that I love animals. Only today I stopped a gang of kids from throwing rocks at a dog for fun because, let’s be honest, that’s a bit of a nuts thing to do to kill the time when you’re ten years old. It’s also harsh on the dog and I should know. When I was a kid I’d often have people throw rocks at me. I remember once this fucking prick in school, I want to name him but I’ve forgotten what he was called. Was it Dan? Or Evs? Or Dan Evs? Fuck knows. Anyway, he threw a big piece of tar at my head and it pretty much knocked me out. this one time a guy called Pingu (who I found out recently got caught sucking a guys dick. It’s ironic when you know how often he’d call me a bum-boy. Last time I was involved in a blow-job I was on the good end of it and there was a hot girl on the bad end of it) hit my head against the wall outside of metal-work so hard it did knock me out. So I know what it’s like to be bullied by human boys as a human boy so I can only imagine what it must feel like for a little Yorkshire Terrier. What was I on about?
Ah yes! I love animals. I don’t like to see them getting hurt. I also love meat. And cheese. And milk. Pretty much anything you can put in your mouth that at one point had, or was in something that had, a heartbeat, friends, parents and could feel emotions such as joy or love. This is because I am a human boy and human boys have evolved to eat things like meat. But because I love animals I can also understand why some people choose not to kill then eat them and I have no problem with this. I actually plan on murdering a pig at some point myself just to see if I can do it. If I can’t I will stop eating meat. that seems fair enough.
What I do truly despise is when people force their opinion on other people and lie and use scare tactics or fear-mongering to get their point across. A good example of this might be Evangelist Christians or the Bush Administration. Not this time, though. This time the scum I am talking about are those people we all know very little about but hate anyway, and with just cause it turns out, PETA. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The pricks.
I follow them on twitter because I like to remind them every now and again that bacon exists when they try and tell the world a dog died somewhere but today shit got real. Today they posted an article titled “5 Gross Facts About Milk-Based Cheese. All cheese, by definition of the word, is milk-based so that’s minus one point for them straight off the bat. The first thing they explain is this:
Milk-based cheese is a product of rape. Like humans, cows produce milk only when they’re pregnant or nursing, so to keep their milk constantly flowing, farmers artificially inseminate cows over and over.
Sounds pretty bad, eh? It’s shocking, in fact! But I looked into it. First off, all of the first page of Google hits when I looked into it are from the PETA website or other die-hard vegan websites. You might also notice that in that paragraph they link the article to… Another page from the PETA site, so plenty of independent un-biased research has been referenced. Now, you might not know this, but rape is properly awful. It makes me sick and upset so I was concerned by this. After finding information from other websites I think I can rephrase what they were trying to say;
Cows get artificially inseminated once a year so that the birth calves and produce milk.
The problem there, though, is that it isn’t shocking enough to instantly put you off cheese forever. You can see why they dressed it up so extravagantly, like Elton John at the Superbowl. But anywhoo, what else make cheese so gross? Let’s see!
Milk-based cheese has stomach lining in it. Rennet is an enzyme used to curdle (EW!) cheese, and it’s made from calves’ stomach lining—meaning that this pre-cheese gloop must pass through someone else’s stomach before making it to yours
This is more factually correct than the last stab they had at cheese, but it hasn’t passed through another stomach. It’s an enzime that is produced in the fourth stomach of cows to break down food and they extract it from baby cows killed for veal. But again this isn’t shocking enough so they’ve dressed it up like a whore at a fancy party. What’s their next argument, you ask?
Milk-based cheese kills babies. In the dairy industry, male calves are torn away from their mothers shortly after birth and sold for veal. Confined to dark, filthy sheds, they’ll live their entire short lives chained by the neck in tiny crates so small that they can’t even turn around or lie down comfortably. When they are just a few weeks old, they will be killed.
It’s information they could have put in the last one, but then they’d only have four reasons not to eat cheese and four isn’t a very good number. Also referencing themselves again. Take that, credible research! Although the bit about them being chained up is horrible but if they weren’t getting killed for meat no-one would be taking the enzymes, so meat is the bastard-in-the-sack here, not cheese. This next one is my favorite…
Milk-based cheese has ADDICTIVE drugs in it. According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, milk contains DRUGS. Cows naturally produce morphine, codeine, and other opiates (aka “drugs”) in their livers, and all these can and often times do end up in their milk—and, ultimately, in your body if you drink milk. This means that if you’ve ever tried to give up cheese or any other product made from cow’s milk, it probably made you feel sick—but not for the reason that you think. It’s not because your body is trying to tell you that it needs cheese to survive. It’s because your body is literally going through physical, chemical withdrawals in the same way that drug addicts go through withdrawal symptoms when they’re kicking an addiction. Stay strong and fight through it. You’ll survive and come out on top, and your body will totally thank you.
Did you know that if we “try to give up cheese” we have withdrawals like Mark “Rents” Renton does in Trainspotting? I didn’t, either! which is odd because sometimes I go quite a while without eating cheese. I don’t need to pick this apart. You’re not idiots. You can see why this is nuts. their final ‘fact’ is very interesting, though.
Milk-based cheese is … well, it’s just gross. Aside from the drugs we already mentioned, milk products are also loaded with artery-clogging saturated fat and cholesterol. And that’s not all. It’s also crawling with bacteria—some of it harmless and some of it pretty icky. For example, the same family of bacteria that makes Limburger cheese smell so bad (brevibacterium linens) is what makes your feet smell so bad.
Cheese is gross. that’s a scientific fact-and-a-half right there, that is. Cheese is gross and some bacteria in it is ‘icky’.
So, to summarize, the good folk at PETA are better people than you and better educated than you and we all rape cows because our bodies are so dependent on cheese we kill babies.
Here’s a cow having fun at the beach to ease the guilt.
Moo.
And that guy who hit me with a slab of tar was call Dan Griff, not Dan Evs.
The "Wonderful" World of (Spencer) Miles Lloyd 